Speeches by Kirkham.

“Was that planned in advance, though? Did they know that they were going to be doing that? That is an emergency response that needs to be planned, isn’t it?”

“Something else that the borough council told us was that the centre of town was pretty much left to them. They were providing the toilets and bottled water around the town centre. That is quite a big gap. How did that happen?”

“Yes, and so that people can lift it, open it and use it. To go back to the water stations, there were problems, I understand, with them being overcrowded, closing early and people struggling to get into them rather than their being accessible. What have you learned from that about the water stations that you picked and…”

“It is so important that in an incident like this you have a clockwork plan that cannot fail like that?”

“The other thing that came up, considering that these were vulnerable, elderly or ill people, was that sometimes when water was delivered, a 12kg pack of big bottles of water was stuck on their doorstep, which was something they could not access. That is something that you need to consider for next time. How come that h…”

“That is the problem, isn’t it—some of them just won’t be able to.”

“You said there were 5,000 customers who were vulnerable on this list, so how many of those had to wait more than 12 hours for that water supply?”

“Did they have to apply to go on that, or was that people on social tariffs? How did you check that people were not left off that?”

“I was coming on to the vulnerable households and how you identified them. Did they have to come to you? How did you work out who was vulnerable and needed that delivery?”

“How long did it take for the first walk-in water station within Tunbridge Wells to be opened?”

“Tonbridge is not Tunbridge Wells though, is it?”

“So the council had to do it. How long did that take?”

“Good morning and thank you for coming. I used to live in Tunbridge Wells, in a previous life, so I know the area a little bit, from a long time ago. The borough council told us that it took a day for the bottled-water station to be opened, and that it was in Tonbridge, which is a different town and quite difficult to g…”

“It could be considered almost a national security issue, then.”

“Henry has covered pretty much all that I wanted to ask. There is just one small thing about the weaknesses in the supply chain. I was reading about the availability of sodium hypochlorite to disinfect drinking water. Do you see the availability of these things in the supply chain as a weakness? Do you think that needs …”

“So it would be a bit more complicated than that. Thank you.”

“Could they have used that money, for example, to travel to a bottled water station or would it just have been a credit on their bill?”

“My last question is about the statutory compensation. Now, I may have got this wrong. I was reading the papers earlier, and they said that on 8 December—so after the incident—some of those customers were offered a £50 advance credit. Do you think that is sufficient, given the impact of the outage?”

“It sounds like they did not get water for a period of time, because some of those things could only have happened if they had not had water.”

“But you ended up having to use the fire service because you did not have capacity?”